Project Nemesis (A Kaiju Thriller) by Jeremy Robinson

the surgeon said before placing a rib splitter in the sternum’s incision. He turned the crank, quickly separating the flexible ribs and exposing the lungs and heart below.
    Elliot stood and walked closer. The scene was horrible, but this was the moment of truth. She needed to see. Gordon leaned in closer too, eager to see whether he would live or die.
    “Deflating the lungs,” the surgeon said, then rather callously poked each lung with a scalpel. Air hissed from the puncture wounds and the lungs sagged away, revealing the heart.
    Elliot held her breath.
    The surgeon roughly probed the fist-sized heart with his fingers. Then, as though holding a newborn baby, he declared, “Looks like we have a healthy heart.” He turned to Gordon. “Congratulations, sir.”
    Gordon didn’t reply. Instead he looked at Elliot and gave her a smile. An earnest smile. It felt so strange, coming from the gruff General, but she had come through for him in a big way. If the surgeons were any good—and she was sure they were—then Gordon would have a new, fully compatible heart beating in his chest in the next few hours.
    She returned the smile, thinking, you’re welcome.
    The anesthetist laid Gordon back on the operating table and directed the bright lights above him toward his chest. “Just lie back and relax,” she said while checking the IV already in his arm. “Time for a nap.” She took a rubber stopper off the end of a previously prepared syringe and injected the sedative into his IV line.
    The wrinkles in Gordon’s forehead smoothed out as he relaxed. He turned his head lazily toward Endo. “She’s okay.”
    Was he talking about Maigo ? Or were the drugs already making him silly?
    But Endo nodded as though he knew what this meant.
    The anesthetist slipped a mask over the General’s nose and mouth. “Count back from ten.”
    He made it to “four” before losing consciousness.
    “We’re good to go,” the anesthetist said.
    While the nurse began shaving Gordon’s chest, one of the surgeons lifted Maigo’s freshly severed heart from her chest. The organ should have captivated Elliot, but she couldn’t look at it. Instead, she gazed at Maigo’s still form.
    She’s dead.
    A deep sense of sadness confused Elliot. Researchers sometimes became attached to their specimens. Rooted for them. Secretly wished they would live. But Maigo had been around for such a short amount of time. Then again, in that time, she’d become a fully grown and stunning woman. And now, she was a bloody, torn-open corpse.
    Ignoring the doctors prepping for the real surgery, Elliot stepped up to Maigo and looked down. She cringed at the sight of the girl’s spread ribs and the open cavity between them, where her heart and inflated lungs had been. She shook her head slowly. Moving on autopilot, Elliot disengaged the rib separator and placed it on the medical tray. The ribs flexed back together at a jagged angle. It was then that Elliot noticed a few of the ribs had broken. The surgeon had been unnecessarily rough.
    A sudden burst of anger gave her clarity. She was identifying with Maigo , who’d been just a girl not long ago and had just undergone a gross abuse. Elliot wanted to be angry at Gordon and the doctors, but she was really to blame. She created Maigo to save her own life.
    You had to die, she thought. I’m sorry.
    With tears in her eyes, she lifted the skin back in place. She pushed everything back together and kept her eyes on Maigo’s face.
    A hand on her shoulder made her flinch.
    She turned.
    Endo.
    Her pulse quickened, but she saw no threat in his eyes.
    “She was beautiful,” he said.
    What was this? Endo had never spoken to her. Not once.
    He turned to Elliot. “We are aligned, you and I.”
    Aligned?
    Then she understood. When Gordon said, “She’s okay,” he was talking about her!
    “You two really don’t need to be here now,” said one of the masked surgeons. “In fact, it would be great if you could remove the